New Soviet Documents on Nazi Atrocities – published by Hutchinson with the approval of the Soviet propaganda newspaper Soviet War News, in cooperation with the Press Department of the Soviet Embassy in London, [C. 1943] – first edition. This copy belonged to the Jewish-Soviet journalist and writer Ilya Ehrenburg, and bears his handwritten signature on the title page.
A detailed report issued as part of a joint Soviet–British propaganda effort aimed at exposing the war crimes of Nazi Germany in the territories of the Soviet Union under occupation. The goal was to mobilize British and Western public opinion and strengthen emotional and political ties with the Soviet Union, which at that stage of the war was an ally of Britain. The report includes English translations of official Soviet documents, compiled by Soviet government-appointed investigative commissions. It features firsthand eyewitness accounts written at the time of the events, documenting Nazi atrocities: mass executions, torture, the total destruction of villages, starvation, early evidence of genocide, and the annihilation of civilian populations—particularly in regions such as Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, and others.
Among the contents are dozens of letters written by German soldiers themselves, in which they document their crimes. For example: From a letter written by Corporal Walter Franz, July 1942: “Dear Marianne,
Usually, the villages we capture are burned down by our men; we push the civilian population further back… We set everything on fire here. You simply cannot imagine what’s going on! Children run out of burning houses, and mothers, often with infants in their arms, drag out all their belongings…”. From a letter found on the body of German Private Karl Fischbach, to Heitzmann, September 1942: “We had to burn many villages to the ground in order to destroy populated points where people of an inferior race were hiding. Often we had to take the male population as well. It’s a nasty business, but with these races, one must act without compromise. There can be no mercy here. It’s true that the innocent suffer the most in this, but there you have it—that’s war.” There are also numerous testimonies describing mass murders of Jews, such as: From the interrogation protocol of prisoner of war Karl Berner, June 20, 1942, Crimean Front: “The entire Jewish population of the city was shot. All Jews were given a notice ordering them to report to the command post with food supplies for eight days. Some of the Jews were collected individually by police and staff representatives. None of these Jews were ever seen again. It was said they were shot 25 miles from Simferopol, along the Feodosiya road. I also saw Jews hanged on Karl Marx Street. They were accused of sabotage…” …and many more.
The report is accompanied by 48 illustrations and photographs, vividly depicting the atrocities, including images of civilian victims. The report was distributed around 1943–1944, following the Battle of Stalingrad, during a period when the Western world began to gradually discover the extent of what had occurred in the Nazi-occupied territories. The Soviet Union sought to influence British and American public opinion through a series of such publications, aimed at exposing the scale of atrocities on the Eastern front—which, until then, had received very little coverage in the West.
Ilya Ehrenburg (1891–1967), a Jewish-Soviet writer, journalist and intellectual, was one of the most prominent figures in the Soviet Union during World War II. During the war, he served as a senior war correspondent and became known for his scathing articles against the Nazi invader and for mobilizing Soviet and international public opinion to support the struggle. After being exposed to the horrors of the extermination, particularly in Ukraine and Belarus, he became one of the leading figures in the effort to document the annihilation of the Jews in Soviet territories. (His most formative and famous article was published in the newspaper “Red Star” on July 24, 1942, in which he explicitly called to “Kill the Germans!” – a bold slogan that was widely used in Soviet posters. Adolf Hitler personally ordered that Ehrenburg be captured and hanged.) Together with the writer Vasily Grossman, he initiated and edited The Black Book – the first compilation to systematically report on Nazi crimes against Soviet Jews. Despite his tremendous contribution, his work was censored in the final years of Stalin’s rule, as part of the broader suppression of Jewish Holocaust memory in the Soviet Union.
128 pages + 48 photo plates. Good condition.
